ICE issued its “Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2024” this week. Notwithstanding headlines like “U.S. deportations at highest level since 2014, ICE report shows” (from the Washington Post), the report is a dismal snapshot of the state of immigration (non-) enforcement in the waning days of the Biden-Harris administration — and reveals just how much work incoming “border czar” Tom Homan has waiting for him. The agency is only doing marginally better compared to its poor performance over the prior two fiscal years — except for interior arrests, where it’s doing worse—and that’s all by design.
ICE Interior Enforcement. I will actually give the Post credit, because if you know how the immigration-enforcement system is supposed to work, its article tells you all that you need to know upfront. Here’s how it begins:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 271,484 immigrants to nearly 200 countries last fiscal year, the highest tally in a decade, according to the agency’s annual report published Thursday.
Most deportees had crossed the U.S. southern border illegally, part of a record number of people fleeing authoritarian regimes, poverty and economic collapse in the Western Hemisphere after the pandemic. The ICE report covered enforcement operations from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30.
In other words, ICE did “deport” a lot of aliens in FY 2024, but nearly all of them were first encountered by CBP at the Southwest border and were subsequently handed over to its sister agency to do the actual removal part.
Of course, thanks to the disaster that has been the Southwest border since roughly March 2021, ICE had a lot more illegal border crossers to deport (although nearly all the migrants who weren’t expelled under Title 42 were released by CBP and are still here).
It’s sort of like holding a party when your parents are out of town and then boasting to them when they get back that you set a new household recycling record for bottles and cans.
True, detaining and removing illegal border-crossers encountered by CBP is part of ICE’s job, but its complementary (and much more important) duties relate to arresting, detaining, and removing aliens from the interior of the United States — duties usually carried out by the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) directorate.
As the Post notes: “Deportations by ICE during Trump’s first term peaked at 267,260 during the 2019 fiscal year, data show. Under Trump, deportees were more likely to be individuals arrested in the interior of the United States, rather than recent border-crossers.”
That still wasn’t true under Biden’s last full fiscal year, although at least in part ICE’s interior performance did improve — except, as I will explain below, when it came to interior arrests of removable aliens.
ICE ERO Detainers. Many if not most removable aliens come to ICE ERO‘s attention after they commit a crime and are taken into custody by state or local law enforcement agencies.
When that happens, ICE first determines whether the alien is removable, and if so, the agency may (and likely should) place a detainer on the alien.
According to the ICE report, ERO issued detainers on nearly 150,000 criminal aliens last fiscal year, an increase over each of the prior four fiscal years, but fewer than the nearly 165,500 detainers it issued under Trump in FY 2019 and more than 27,000 fewer than in FY 2018.
That only tells part of the story, however. ICE ERO issued about 23,500 more detainers in FY 2024 than in FY 2020 (the last full fiscal year of the Trump administration, when 122,233 detainers were issued), but as a reminder, the Covid-19 pandemic (which was declared that March) impacted enforcement generally for nearly all of the last half that fiscal year.
Pandemic restrictions affected both ICE detention and state and local detention resources — meaning ICE was forced to issue fewer detainers and that there were fewer criminal aliens detained by states and localities to issue detainers for.
The real decline in detainers started in late FY 2021 and into FY 2022, once pandemic restrictions were largely lifted but at a point ICE officers were hobbled in issuing them by a September 2021 memo issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas captioned “Guidelines for the Enforcement of Civil Immigration Law” (Mayorkas memo).
The Mayorkas memo put a stranglehold on officers’ ability to investigate, arrest, detain, and remove (collectively, take “enforcement action”) facially removable aliens by forcing those officers to consider irrelevant “mitigating factors” before acting.
How irrelevant? Well, the Mayorkas memo requires ERO to assess the alien’s “advanced or tender age”, any impact of the enforcement action on the alien’s family, and any “public service” any member of the alien’s immediate family may be engaged in before even commencing an investigation.
Those factors may be relevant to whether the alien is eligible for discretionary immigration “relief” (such as asylum) in removal proceedings, but they have nothing to do with whether the alien should be placed into such proceedings to begin with.
A side issue is the fact that many so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions refuse to honor such detainers, rendering their issuance in essence a futile act.
And unlike the first Trump administration, which threatened to cut off federal funding to sanctuaries, the Biden-Harris administration has instead resorted to little more than moral suasion, generally to no avail.
ICE ERO Arrests. According to the ICE report, ERO made 113,431 administrative arrests in FY 2024, 29.3 percent (33,242) of which were “at-large” (in the community) and the rest “custodial” arrests of criminal aliens already detained in state and local facilities.
That was actually a significant — 63.7 percent — decline in at-large arrests compared to FY 2023, when ERO nabbed 91,500 arrests of aliens in the community.
For what it’s worth, however, overall ICE ERO arrests declined in FY 2024 by 33.5 percent compared to the prior fiscal year, when officers took 170,590 aliens into custody.
Why the decrease? As the agency explains in its report:
Throughout the fiscal year, continued high levels of irregular migration at the Southwest Border and the historic growth of ERO’s non-detained docket significantly impacted ERO’s interior enforcement and case management operations. In addition, ERO detailed significant numbers of its personnel to support DHS efforts for managing irregular migration at the Southwest Border over the past several fiscal years, further straining ERO’s finite resources. While ERO continues to invest in enhanced technology and other improvements to streamline the process, the responsibilities associated with the growing docket and the corresponding reallocation of officer time and functions resulted in fewer administrative arrests and at-large arrests in FY 2024 compared to FY 2023.
If that sounds like taxing interior Peter to pay border Paul, you’re on the right track, but in any event, it fails to explain why the Biden-Harris administration failed to ask Congress for additional appropriations for the agency, which the GOP House almost definitely would have been happy to provide.
As is, NBC News reports ICE is facing a $230 million shortfall notwithstanding its $8.7 billion budget.
If officers weren’t spending so much time trying to figure out if removal would adversely affect aliens’ parents and children and determining whether their spouses work for the DMV or Post Office before taking enforcement action under the Mayorkas memo, they’d have more resources to arrest criminal aliens. Just a thought.
ICE Interior Removals. With respect to removals the report explains:
ERO removed significantly more noncitizens in FY 2024 than in both FY 2023 and FY 2022. In FY 2024, ERO removed 271,484 noncitizens — an increase of 90.4% compared to FY 2023 and an increase of 276.1% compared to FY 2022 — to 192 countries.
So far, so good, until you get to figure 26 on page 33 of the ICE Annual Report, “FY 2024 ERO Removals by Arresting Agency”.
It reveals that of those 271,484 “noncitizens” who were removed by ERO in FY 2024, only 47,732 of them were aliens originally arrested in the interior by ICE; the rest (223,752) were first encountered by CBP at the border and the ports.
To be fair, that is a slight increase in ICE interior removals compared to FY 2023 (44,255) and a rather significant bump compared to FY 2022 (28,204). Still, it far lags behind ICE interior removals under Trump in FY 2019 (nearly 86,000).
Go to figure 25 on page 32 and you’ll realize that those FY 2019 Trump ERO removals didn’t simply involve “law-abiding” aliens, either: nearly 65,000 of them were convicted criminals, compared to fewer than 36,300 interior removals of convicted criminals in FY 2024; and an additional 13,498 interior removals in FY 2019 were of aliens facing criminal charges, compared to 8,028 in FY 2024.
The Annual Report doesn’t repeat the “finite resources” dodge to explain the difference when it comes to interior removals — it’s too busy complimenting the agency for improving on its sorry performance in the prior two fiscal years, as noted above.
The Biden-Harris administration’s regime of immigration non-enforcement has left a mess for Donald Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan, to clean up. Don’t believe the headlines about the latest ICE Annual Report — it paints a dismal picture of what happens when you’re in charge of DHS and don’t take the immigration laws you’re charged with enforcing seriously.